An ongoing review of politics and culture

This is a long post about Christianity, libertarianism, and environmentalism. You’ve been warned.

I explained in an earlier post why I will not be able to vote for Barack Obama, and said that I still had to decide whether I can vote for John McCain. At the moment I am thinking that the answer will be No. I could list reasons, but that’s not what I want to do in this post.

I’m a Christian who takes very seriously St. Paul’s claim that Christians are never fully at home in any earthly polis, that our citizenship is not of this world, that Christians, wherever they live, are, as Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon put it, resident aliens. I am pleased and proud to be an American — I have always thought that it’s actually cool to be an American — but America will never be as important to me as the Church. That’s just how it is.

This means that when I think about American politics, I tend to ask what policies are best for the cause of Christianity — but unlike many of my fellow evangelicals, I don’t think this country ever should be “a Christian nation,” and do not want to see specifically Christian beliefs and practices embodied in the law of the land. I think such an eventuality would be bad for the country and even worse for Christianity. (I’m not going to defend this claim either. Bear with me, I’m getting to something.)

My own long-considered view is that Christians ought to be, broadly speaking, libertarian in their orientation. In a society characterized by a great deal of personal freedom, Christianity will not appear as coercively “normal,” as something enshrined in the formal or informal political order. Instead it can appear as properly counter-cultural, and, indeed, if there is no possibility that Christians will have their views so enshrined, they will be free to be as counter-cultural as their beliefs lead them to be, without being caught up in the absurd entanglements of patriotism-as-piety. Moreover, in a libertarian society characterized by smaller government, Christians would also be able to do greater works of mercy and charity, encumbered by fewer governmental regulations.

So, given my libertarian presumption, will I be voting for Bob Barr this fall? Perhaps — but I have a problem. Barr likes to say that “Everybody is libertarian about something in this country,” and that is almost certainly true, but it’s equally true that everybody is non-libertarian about something in this country. Even in the Libertarian Party, the gun-libertarians can draw the line at the legalization of drugs, and the drug-libertarians get queasy when they contemplate being in the same party with NRA members.

For me, the quease-inducing issue is not abortion, despite my fervent opposition to the practice. I could imagine that in a truly libertarian society — though probably not in our own — Christians and like-minded people could do a great deal to limit abortion even if it were legal. No, my chief concern is about what would happen to the environment — what we Christians like to call Creation — in a libertarian society. Now, according to Ontheissues.org, Barr has “no stance on record” regarding the environment — a fact noteworthy in itself — but we know that his core belief is this: “At the core of libertarianism is a trust in and respect for the personal choices of every individual.”

However, we also know that no empirical claim could possibly be better established than this: People, left to their own devices, simply do not make wise decisions about their natural environments. They almost invariably chose short-term goods that leave their descendants with damaged and impoverished conditions; and often the damage is irreversible. And even when hard lessons are learned by one generation, they are likely to be forgotten by the next, or the one after that.

Moreover, these the stakes in these matters are raised dramatically in technologically powerful ages such as our own. If a libertarian with a hands-off environmental policy were to be elected President in this country, and were to implement such a policy, the vultures would descend so quickly and do so much damage — especially to water resources, and especially in the West — in a single four-year Presidential term that recovery could take decades if it could be achieved at all. I think this would be a tragic result, and my reasons for thinking so are simultaneously civic and Christian (the latter deriving from the Biblical mandate for what people are now calling “Creation care”). Is a significant increase in personal freedom worth such a price? I don’t think I can say that, not given my current state of knowledge, anyway.

Of course, this is all speculative in the extreme. Bob Barr is not going to be elected President, and even if that miracle did happen he’d be faced with a Congress that wouldn’t let him do much of what he wants to do (repeal the 16th Amendment, for instance). So it might be worth my while to cast a symbolic protest vote for Barr, and I may well do that. But it makes me uneasy to contemplate casting a vote for someone whose candidacy I can’t truly endorse.

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Alan

I find your defense of Christian libertarianism compelling, and also resonate with your conclusions on the potential negative effects of allowing complete personal freedom on things a Christian ought to care about (such as the environment, or the poor, for another example). While I think that people respond to incentives, the most influential incentives are inherently personal, and it is likely that people will not curb their destructive behavior until it has distinctly PERSONAL negative effects. For example, it is possible to wax philosophical environmentalist and drive a gas-guzzling SUV until prices of gas increases to the point that behavior change feels rational or justified. This becomes a problem however if the tipping point into personal incentives is significantly after the point that there is significant (and irreversible) damage being done to the good in question. In the example in question, personal incentives to curb environmentally destructive behavior may not develop until this good is significantly and irreparably damaged.

This is when I tend to lean into a bit more liberal understanding of the role of governmental regulations and constraints imposed on individuals to protect things (or people) whose interest may get squeezed out in a free market (or just libertarian individual approach) running its course. That said, I also see the inherent difficulties of this approach.

A question I keep coming back to is this: If we are to regulate or protect certain things (or groups of people) because of concern for what may happen to these things without regulation, how do we decide what these things are without moving towards a society where a derived ethical code from a specific belief system (such as Christianity) is integrated into the law, resulting in some of the ill-advised effects you highlight (‘entanglements of patriotism-as-piety’)

I think an idealist libertarian might believe that individualism and environmental stewardship are compatible. Environmental groups would put public pressure on polluting entities, and the public would vote with their dollars. The Sierra Club acts out of self-interest, properly defined, as much as Exxon does.

I’m not sure it would work, or if it did work, I’m not sure it would work better than the current regulatory system.

I don’t know, Alan, I don’t know if we can take it for granted that Libertarianism = bad environment. Certainly the worst environmental areas in the world are the industrial former communist countries, which were the opposite of Libertarian regimes.

Also, the worst environments tend to be in the most impoverished areas where feeding your family takes precedence over saving the forest. As economies grow and wealth increases, the role of natural resources also changes. To the early pioneers, a virgin forest looked like a great source for fire wood and timber. Today the same forest looks like a great place to take a hike and enjoy nature.

There also seems to be a connection between personal ownership and the environment. The solution to the “Tragedy of the Commons” problem everyone cites is solvable by selling parcels of the common to private individuals who know that over-grazing THEIR land will lead to future poverty.

Can we conclusively say that we have a cleaner environment because of regulation? I am not sure what specific water crisis in the West can be prevented by regulation from Washington. Maybe a better solution can be worked out between land owners, citizens, and businesses that preserves the environment they live in? The power of public pressure and lawsuits does more for the environment than the EPA could ever do anyway.

As for the church, abortion and the enviornment are both God issues. We Christians know deep down that the core problem with abortion is a culture that does not value life. Regulation of abortion would be a surface victory for us, when the real victory is much more difficult. Our society as a whole cares more for the endangered polar bear than for the endangered fetus, which may help explain why environmentalism has not caught on in Christian circles as much as it should.

I have a sense that American society at large is trending toward a more libertarian political outlook, but this trend has not resulted in a (mainstream) libertarian political party forming to represent it due to these types of ideological purity tests.

To make a silly analogy, suppose someone wrote this: “I generally believe that the government should take a larger role in the American economy, but I could never vote for a Democrat because I could never accept a Soviet-style command economy, or the gulag archipelago for that matter.”

This type of thinking seems silly to (most of) us because we have the example of a functioning political party right in front of us to demonstrate that it is possible to legislate on this political logic without taking it to its extreme. People allow themselves to be convinced, on the other hand, that they cannot self-identify as libertarians unless they would accept full-blown anarchy or the most extreme planks of the LP party platform.

We live in a bureaucratic state with an enormous network of national parks and a web of environmental protections deeply entrenched in the law and bureaucratic regulations. I don’t think that there is any danger of this net being dismantled under a libertarian executive. As some of the previous comments have pointed out we might see some less bureaucratic and more market-oriented approaches to preserving the environment attempted in some cases, and these market-oriented approaches might be more effective in achieving your preservationist goals in the long run. The analogy here would be Social Security, where a libertarian President might find a way to invest some of the trust fund money in private capital markets, or at least allow some people to choose to direct how their retirement funds are invested within broad categories, while the Democrats are still wedded to an FDR-style bureacratic approach.

Although I realize you made the comment in passing, I’m intrigued by your remark that “I could imagine that in a truly libertarian society — though probably not in our own — Christians and like-minded people could do a great deal to limit abortion even if it were legal.” Would you care to flesh out that statement (either in this post or another)? How could Christians and like-minded people limit abortion in a libertarian society in ways that they cannot now? I myself imagine that the right to privacy enshrined in Roe v. Wade and its judicial progeny would only be enhanced in a libertarian society.

Presumably, not all your political stands need to be dictated by your Christianity – Christians might prefer some environmental regulation, or some roads, because they don’t want their grandchildren breathing smog, or because they need to get from place to place.

I guess the question is whether, solely because you are a Christian, you have a duty to oppose environmental libertarianism because of the suffering you believe it will cause. Once you identify that moral principle, however, I don’t see how you draw the line at the environment. Do you have a Christian duty to oppose Obama’s pro-union policies because of the suffering they will cause? How about his judges?

On a related note, I am still wrestling with Noah’s earlier post on gambling. I think it’s morally wrong for the state to involved in supplying gambling, at least in the form it’s in now. Do I have a Christian duty to do something about it? I think I probably do.

Thanks to all for the thoughtful and helpful comments. Two brief responses for now:

Katherine, the current regime implements many controls on private agencies who attempt to provide social services, especially in the medical realm; presumably in a libertarian regime those controls would be weakened and there would consequently be more opportunities for innovation in responding to the possibility of abortion. I should probably flesh this out further at some point.

J Mann, I don’t think that all my political stands need to be dictated by my Christianity, but I would surely want them to be consistent with it. And before I could say whether I would oppose a policy because of the suffering it would cause, I would need to have some sense of what suffering the removal of the policy would cause. Point counterpoint, you know. For me, the economic benefits of increased water use in the West don’t come close to outweighing the long-term damage such water use would do. I feel the same way about certain other hot-button environmental issues.

There’s a great deal on these topics I couldn’t get into in one post. Most important, I’d like to raise the question of whether it can make sense to be a libertarian on the national level and a communitarian on the local level. It’s very possible that we do need environmental regulation but that it’s not best implemented by the federal government.

I think that the basic idea that entangling government and religion eventually strangles religion is well-established. I also think that the idea that a healthy Christian congregation will always be somewhat at odds with, to put it bluntly, power, is exactly right.

I think that the libertarianism vs. environment debate is put a little starkly, however. First, generally speaking, environmental protection is a luxury good. As societies become wealthier, they tend to devote more resources to conservation. So the trade-off is not so obvious over time. Second there are lots of ways to use property rights to reduce tragedy of the commons problems (though not eliminate them). Finally, sometimes libertarianism needs to be rescued from Libertarians. Hayek, for example, was pretty clear that as population density rises, property rights can, should and will be more circumscribed. Lots of what you are talking about (the best example being water in the West) is really a function of greater population density requiring more regulation. That is not ipso facto anti-libertarian.

Jim, if “greater population density [requires] more regulation,” doesn’t that suggest that societies with high population density can’t afford to be libertarian? You say that this situation is “not ipso facto anti-libertarian,” but it sounds like it is.

It depends what you mean by libertarian. A general orientation to avoiding unnecessary coercion doesn’t imply no limits, and doesn’t imply rules that are uniform across time and space. In my view, the evolutionary development and modification of these rules is central to libertarianism rightly understood, and requires variation. I’ve gone into this a little detail in a prior post .

Very good post about the relationship between Christianity and libertarianism. Thank you.

As for letting environmental concerns influence the choice of candidate for president, I’ll point out that there are NO environmentalists running this year. Obama may pretend to be one, but his main agenda is to grow the government. Where it’s a choice between the best environmental policy and expanding government in the most corrupt way possible (and there are many such choices confronting us) he will chose the latter. McCain’s main priority is to annoy people. Barr probably doesn’t care.

As a Christian environmentalist with conservative, libertarian, liberal political leanings (note the lack of capital letters on those words) I will probably vote for Barr. I will certainly not vote for Obama. I might vote for McCain if he makes a credible promise to undo McCain-Feingold or something along those lines. But most likely it’ll be Barr.